PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (11:50): So often during this parliamentary term and the previous one, we have seen Labor members opposite talking about unions, drumming up unions and saying how responsible and how beholden they are to the unions. What we saw over the weekend was a former Labor union luminary in Bill Kelty absolutely bell the cat when it comes to how the economy is faring.
For Labor members to even try to justify how the economy is going is beyond the pale. Bill Kelty talked about the housing crisis. Bill Kelty talked about how real wages are falling.
And that is true. Now, Labor member after Labor member can talk on this motion, can speak on other motions and can get up in question time and ask Dorothy Dixers of any minister they like. But out in the real world, people are hurting.
Out in the real world, people's wages are falling. And it doesn't matter how many submissions Labor puts to the Fair Work Commission. Last week we saw just about every single Labor member talking about wage justice for childhood educators.
Nobody doubts that those people who are looking after our littlies deserve fair wages; everyone deserves fair wages. But when Labor oversees an economy that is just tanking, then how can they talk about real wages increasing? They are not, and the prices for everything are up, whether it's for energy or whether it's for fuel—and we've seen just over the weekend the situation in the Strait of Hormuz.
It is worrying. It is worse now than when the crisis began some months ago. And yet, have we heard any Labor members talking about that?
We see the prices of groceries going up and up. If you think prices at the supermarket are expensive now, just wait until after Labor finishes buying yet another 130 gigalitres out of the Murray-Darling system. Now, not a lot of metropolitan members realise this, but, when you buy water away from our farmers—when you continue this insidious, ridiculous, unnecessary, unjust and unfair buy-out of our farmers—it means that they can grow less food.
I don't know why people can't realise this, Just recently we saw this government, which has now over $1 trillion in debt, buy another $430 million worth of water. What does that mean? For those people in the gallery, just out of interest, it means the equivalent of 34,400 Olympic sized swimming pools taken away from our farmers, who grow the fruit, the vegetables and all the things that end up on supermarket shelves.
When we can't have Australian made food on supermarket shelves, what do we do? We have to import it from overseas, and we don't know what they grow it with. We don't know what conditions they have.
We don't know what sustainability they have in their growing processes. It's just nuts. Then, when we get a good motion put forward by the member for Bowman to talk about the economic plan—fixing the economy, protecting our way of life—we get Labor members coming in and deriding it.
Well, they could do better to actually get a copy of the coalition's plan, read it with an open mind and see where we can be better in a bipartisan way. Goodness knows, at the moment we are not on a treadmill but, absolutely, on an elevator crashing down when it comes to every economic parameter and every economic indicator. Mr Keelty absolutely summed it up, and Labor members would do well to heed his words.
When you get a union leader such as him, a former union leader, talking about how the economy is going so badly and then you get Labor members—nobody is so blind as somebody who will not see. At the moment, we've got Labor members with their blinkers on. They just refuse to admit that the economy is going badly.
They refuse to admit that families are hurting. They refuse to admit that real wages are falling. They refuse to admit that things are too expensive.
And they refuse to admit that the housing minister has got it all wrong when it comes to the housing market and the housing sector, per se. It is a disgrace, and Labor members need to get back into their electorates and start listening, because people are hurting here.